4.2: Analyzing Poetry

Overview

This section emphasizes the importance of fully engaging with a poem in order to truly understand and perform it. Drawing on Muriel Rukeyser’s idea of giving a poem a “total response,” it encourages readers to approach poetry with emotional openness and focused attention. Poems are more than words on a page. They are emotional experiences shaped by rhythm, sound, tone, and form. Reading poetry out loud and analyzing its elements helps performers internalize a poem’s meaning and deliver it with authenticity. By asking thoughtful questions about voice, tone, structure, and emotional effect, readers can uncover a poem’s deeper truths and share them powerfully with an audience.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Your interpretation of a poem is shaped by your life experiences. (CC-Zero; Kristin Hardwick)

Learning Objectives

1. Engage with poetry through focused, repeated readings that emphasize emotional awareness, tone, diction, and rhythm, in order to experience the poem as the author intended.
2. Analyze various literary and structural elements of a poem—such as speaker, audience, tone, form, and figurative language—to interpret meaning and make informed performance decisions.

Analyzing Poetry

Muriel Rukeyser says in The Life of Poetry that to successfully read a poem, we must give a poem “a total response.” This means giving it all our attention, taking it in slowly, reading it several times. It means listening to the poem openly, without judgment, and without projecting our own assumed meanings onto it. Instead, Rukeyser writes, it means coming “to the emotional meanings at every moment.” As she explains, “That is one reason for the high concentration of music, in poetry.”

To come to emotional meanings at every moment means to adjust and react to the way a poem takes shape with every word, every line, every sentence, every stanza. Each poem creates its own universe as it moves from line to line. It is a universe that Rukeyser describes as the “universe of emotional truth.” So how exactly does one listen with their emotions?

Reading creates an indirect, yet intimate, connection between reader and author. As readers, we take the author’s words—their breath—into ourselves. We shape the words with our own bodies and, too, give them life with our own breath. Reading poetry, we breathe in what a poet breathes out. We share breath. The words and their meanings become part of our body as they move through our mind, triggering sensations in our bodies that lead to thoughts. And through this process, we have experiences that are new and that change us as much as any other experience can.

Poetry is a condensed art form that produces an experience in a reader through words. And though words may appear visually as symbols on the page, the experience that poems produce in us is much more physical and direct. The elements of poetry permit a poet to control many aspects of language—tone, pace, rhythm, sound—as well as language’s effects: images, ideas, sensations. These elements give power to the poet to shape a reader’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experience of the poem. Because form and function are so closely intertwined, it is impossible to paraphrase a poem. This is why we must read poems with full concentration and focus more than once. It is why we must read them out loud. It is why we must be attentive to every aspect of the poem on both ends: as a writer, and as a reader.

Readers come to the page with different backgrounds and a range of different experiences with poetry, but it is how we read a poem that determines our experience of it. “Reading” or even “analyzing” a poem may not be the best description of this process. Instead, one who plans to perform a poem must go through the actual process of “coming to” the poem, ingesting its lines, and responding emotionally.

Consider the following poem by Emily Dickinson:

’Im Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Upon first read of this poem, one might conclude the speaker is thankful she is not popular and well known by others. However, after further analysis, it is possible that this speaker truly does wish to be part of the in-crowd. Perhaps she is trying to impress or identify with the person to whom she is speaking by saying these things while she secretly wishes to be one of the popular people. You can see how the interpretation one chooses for this poem would affect the way one would say the words, use pauses, and select appropriate facial expressions.

Questions to Ask Yourself While Analyzing Poetry

You may find the following considerations helpful as they provide characteristics to look for when analyzing poetry. You can use the answers to these prompts to help you make decisions on how to choose themes/messages to highlight in a performance. They will also help you make performance choices on how to use your voice and body to perform a poem for your audience:

• Determine the Subject of the Poem
  • Paraphrase/summarize the poem: what is it about?
  • Does the poem address a social, psychological, historical, or mythical phenomenon?
• Identify the Poem’s Narrator
  • Who is speaking? Consider age, gender, occupation, and more.
  • To whom?
  • Under what circumstances? Identify the setting.
• Identify the Narrator’s Audience
  • To whom is the narrator speaking?
  • Is the narrator speaking to themselves? If not, is that audience in the same physical space as the narrator? Is the audience a single person, multiple people?
• Note the Diction (Word Choice) of the Poet
  • Be sure to look up all unfamiliar words in a dictionary.
  • What are the words' denotations (defined meaning) and connotations (abstract meaning shaped by emotions and experiences)?
  • Are the words concrete or abstract?
• Determine the Tone of the Poem
  • Is the poem serious? Ironic? Satiric? Contemplative? Ambiguous?
  • Identify words that set the tone.
  • Determine whether the tone changes within the poem.
• Determine the Rhythmical Devices Used by the Poet
  • What is the basic metrical pattern? Line length?
  • What is the length of the stanza?
  • What is the rhyme scheme? End rhyme? Internal rhyme?
  • Does the poet employ any other metrical devices?
  • What form does the poem take? Open or closed?
• Note Your Emotional Response to the Poem
  • How does the poem make you feel?
  • How might you convey those emotions and feelings to an audience using your voice and body language?
• Note the Use of Other Literary Devices
  • What allusions (indirect references) does the poem contain?
  • Listen to the sounds in the poem. Make note of characteristics such as assonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia.
  • Is there any figurative language:

    • Metaphor – A figure of speech that directly compares one thing to another without using “like” or “as,” suggesting they are the same in a meaningful way.

    • Simile – A comparison between two unlike things using “like” or “as.”

    • Symbolism – The use of an object, character, or action to represent a deeper meaning or abstract idea.

    • Imagery – Descriptive language that appeals to the senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) to create vivid mental pictures.

    • Irony – A contrast between expectation and reality, often highlighting an unexpected or opposite outcome or meaning.

    • Personification – Giving human qualities or actions to non-human things, animals, or abstract ideas.

    • Antithesis – The placement of two opposite or contrasting ideas side by side to emphasize their difference.

    • Hyperbole – An intentional and dramatic exaggeration used for emphasis or effect.

    • Metonymy – A figure of speech in which something is referred to by the name of something closely associated with it (e.g., “The White House” for the U.S. government).

    • Synecdoche – A figure of speech in which a part represents the whole or the whole represents a part (e.g., “hands” for workers).

    • Allegory – A story in which characters, events, and settings symbolize deeper moral, political, or philosophical meanings.

    • Paradox – A statement that seems contradictory or impossible but reveals a deeper truth.

    • Understatement – Presenting something as less important or intense than it actually is, often for subtle humor or effect.  

    • Overstatement – Stating something in exaggerated or amplified terms; similar to hyperbole but not always as extreme.

  • Note the use or absence of punctuation.
  • Titles are important in poetry. What does the title say about the work?
• Determine the Values of the Poem
  • Does the poet succeed in recreating his experiences within the reader? How?
  • Is the experience intensely felt by the reader?

By thoughtfully considering these questions, you can deepen your understanding of a poem’s layers and make more intentional, impactful performance choices. This kind of analysis not only enriches your interpretation but also helps you connect more meaningfully with your audience—bringing the poem to life through your unique voice, perspective, and emotional expression.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Activity 1: Total Response Practice

Objective: Practice “total response” reading and build emotional awareness when engaging with a poem.

Instructions:

1. Choose a short poem (10–20 lines) of your choice.

2. Read the poem aloud three times, slowly and with focus.

3. After each reading, jot down your emotional reactions. What images or phrases stood out? How did the tone affect you?

4. Reflect: How did your interpretation or feelings change with each read?

5. In 5–6 sentences, summarize the emotional “universe” the poem creates and how it affected you personally.

Extension Activity: Share your reading aloud in pairs or small groups and discuss how different readers experienced the same poem emotionally.